Entitled “Every Christchurch person who buys a car goes white-haired within a week,” this cartoon appeared in the June 1935 issue of The New Zealand Railways Magazine. Although cycling is less popular 74 years on, the subject is still quite topical.
Victoria Square 1949
8 comments:
Especially if Charlie Chimp is monkeying around on the road:
http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/monkey-tale-1952/overview
http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/monkey-tale-1952/overview
Ha, if that was Melbourne today the damn car drivers would just drive straight over the top of the cyclists, I kid you not!
Christchurch isn't much better in that sense, cycling on the city streets is a precarious endeavor - hence the decline in popularity. The biggest danger is drivers opening car doors without looking first.
It helps to have a nice bike trail - a rail trail - right behind your home. And to live in a city that has extended cycle trails along the lakeshore, then inland to parks etc.
That said, one instantly becomes a "thrillseeker" exposed to such joys as the biker body slam - car door in your handlebars - as soon as you hit (sic) city streets.
Apart from the advantage of being perfectly flat, one of the joys of Christchurch is the Avon River. Its cycleways along the banks afford safe access to the inner city from the suburbs adjacent to the river, its estuary and across the nearby parks and scenic reserves.
In an era when we're still building more motorways and demolishing built heritage in favour of parking space, the city's cycleways remain underdeveloped and poorly maintained, but if one should prefer a slower pace of life then they can afford a far more pleasant and less stressful means of traversing the city and its environs.
Ahhh, something akin to the numerous heritage houses and a 400 yr old Red gum tree being chopped down for the damn Eastlink freeway here in Melbourne.
In September 2007 Graham Condon, a Christchurch City Councillor was killed when knocked off his bicycle into oncoming traffic by an opening car door.
Sad to say that rather than allocate funding to safe cycleway development as a memorial to him (a matter that was close to his heart), the Council has allocated $13 million to the construction of a memorial recreation centre in an outer suburban school's playground.
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